Honestly, Beautifully : honey blade
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2002-06-24 - 12:41 a.m.
Hey, a Google hit for "I don't like children". Nice :)
My mum, sister and I went to Monaghan this afternoon. My dad's been working a locum there so we decided to meet up there for Sunday lunch.
As I said yesterday, this meant sitting in my mum's car for the duration of today's church, where I successfully managed to read through a large chunk of The Shawshank Redemption and listened to the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack twice.
Now, a confession. I have never listened to that soundtrack all the way through before today. There are two conga tracks, for one thing, and they sounded horribly out of place to me. Also, the music gets very distorted in the second half of the CD and neither Neko nor I saw the point in listening to those tracks when the more orchestral ones sounded so much nicer.
Sitting alone in a car for almost two hours can give you amazing perspective on things.
It occurred to me that the tracks had been placed in roughly the same order they are used in the film, which may well be a convention of film soundtracks when the score is specifically composed for the film (as opposed to someone in a mixing studio thinking "yeah, this song would work for this movie"). Furthermore, as good as the soundtrack is as a stand-alone music CD, the experience is greatly enhanced when you've watched the film.
None of which sounds particularly amazing, admittedly. If you've seen the film you may know what I'm driving at here, but for the benefit of those who haven't I'll elaborate.
Requiem for a Dream presents you with a situation involving four people. Said four people then slowly set about destroying their own lives without even realising it.
This is where it gets a little bit complicated. The final few scenes rapidly cut from character to character. It's a very intense part of the film and it forms the climax. By the very nature of this part I don't know how anyone who's seen it could not have the imagery ingrained in their memories. Only the images, mind. When I watched it, admittedly I paid very little attention to the soundtrack.
When listening to the soundtrack today, I was listening to the piece of music used during this scene and it all flooded into my mind. The music uses an accelerated heartbeat effect and that's what triggered it. You synch up the images with the sounds.
Then it stopped. A few seconds of silence. Then the pulsing of the following track (Lux Aeterna, if anyone wants to hunt it down and listen to it to see what I mean) began. And things just seemed to hit me like a tonne of bricks.
It's perfectly normal for music to cause emotional responses in people. This is something I've been interested in for years and years. But I swear I've never had an emotional response on anywhere near the same level as this.
Ah, I'm rambling, I know I am. It's almost 1am, after all. At least I don't have too much to do in the morning :)
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